Ryland Lecture: Hidden Histories of Black Civil Rights

Join the Department of History for the 2024-25 Ryland Lecture with Dylan C. Penningroth, professor of law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at UC Berkeley Law. 

How did African Americans think about, talk about, and use the law long before the marches of the 1960s? Weaving together a variety of sources — from state and federal appellate courts to long-forgotten documents found in county courthouse basements, from family interviews to church records — this lecture will reveal how African Americans thought about, talked about, and used the law long before the marches of the 1960s. In a world that denied their constitutional rights, Black people built lives for themselves through common law “rights of everyday use.” Penningroth’s research offers a rich vision of Black life ― a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle.

Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South(opens in a new tab) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review,(opens in a new tab) the Journal of American History,(opens in a new tab) the American Historical Review(opens in a new tab), and the Journal of Family History.(opens in a new tab) Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians’ Huggins-Quarles committee, a Weinberg College Teaching Award (Northwestern University), a McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (Northwestern), and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

Before joining UC Berkeley in 2015, Dylan Penningroth was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Virginia (1999-2002), at Northwestern University (2002-2015), and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (2007-2015).